Abstract
Lorena Ochoa competed on the US-LPGA Tour from 2003 to 2010, and earned her first Major victory at the Ricoh British Women’s Open in 2007, where she also became the first woman ever to earn a tournament title at the Old Course at St. Andrews. Ochoa would hold the Rolex World Number One ranking from that point onward until her surprisingly early retirement in 2010. Throughout this essay, we rely on theorizing by Jose Esteban Muñoz (1999) to read a variety of cultural texts including English-language newspapers, magazines, and online golf periodicals as substantive and representative sources generated by key word searches on Ochoa’s ‘rookie season’, ‘British Open win’, and ‘retirement’. These texts became sites for reading Ochoa’s global sport encounters through a lens of ‘disidentification’. We consider our reading of these three career moments as our own practice in becoming attuned to a brown commons. Drawing on this analysis, we outline three core components of such an attunement: a) respecting brown communities and members as holders/agents of knowledge; b) learning to see agitative affect beyond practices of resistance; and c) re-calibrating the worldly possibilities for sport and physical activity in struggles for social and spatial justice.
This chapter analyses key moments in the career of US-Ladies Professional Golf Association (US-LPGA) golfer, Lorena Ochoa Reyes. Given the economic resources and prominence of her family and her elite athletic skill, Ochoa was identified early in her career as one who might put her native country, Mexico, on the Western sport and popular culture landscape. She began playing golf at the age of five with an omniscient goal to become number one in the world. Throughout Ochoa's professional golf career, she remakes not only herself but also a broader public that includes other brown subjects. In addition to refusing invitations to distance herself from Mexico, Ochoa also amassed major endorsements without adopting the US-LPGA branding strategy, especially the components focused on sex-appeal. Elite athletes, like performance artists, may be especially able to access systems of representations and thereby act in ways that are generative of strong counterpublics and counterpublicity.